Israel hit nuclear project in Syria

Strike last month seen by some in U.S. as premature

October 14, 2007|By DAVID E. SANGER and MARK MAZZETTI The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Israel's air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and U.S. intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports.

The reactor was apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel.

The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state. The Bush administration was divided at the time about the wisdom of Israel's strike, U.S. officials said, and some senior policymakers still regard the attack as premature.

The attack on the reactor project has echoes of an Israeli raid more than a quarter century ago, in 1981, when Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq shortly before it was to have begun operating. That attack was officially condemned by the Reagan administration, though Israelis consider it among their military's finest moments, and, in the weeks before the Iraq war, Bush administration officials said they believed that attack set back Iraq's nuclear ambitions by many years.

By contrast, the facility that the Israelis struck in Syria appears to have been much further from completion, the American and foreign officials said. They said it would have been years before the Syrians could have used the reactor to produce the spent nuclear fuel that could, through a series of additional steps, be reprocessed into bomb-grade plutonium.

Many details remain unclear, most notably how much progress the Syrians had made in construction before the Israelis struck, the role of any assistance provided by North Korea, and whether the Syrians could make a plausible case that the reactor was intended to produce electricity. In Washington and Israel, information about the raid has been wrapped in extraordinary secrecy and restricted to just a handful of officials, while the Israeli press has been prohibited from publishing information about the attack.

The New York Times reported last week that a debate had begun within the Bush administration about whether the information secretly cited by Israel to justify its attack should be interpreted by the United States as reason to toughen its approach to Syria and North Korea. In later interviews, officials made clear that the disagreements within the administration began this summer, as a debate about whether an Israeli attack on the incomplete reactor was warranted then.

The officials did not say that the administration had ultimately opposed the Israeli strike, but that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were particularly concerned about the ramifications of a pre-emptive strike in the absence of an urgent threat.

Even though it has signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Syria would not have been obligated to declare the existence of a reactor during the early phases of construction. It would have also had the legal right to complete construction of the reactor, as long as its purpose was to generate electricity.

In his only public comment on the raid, Syria's president, Bashar Assad, acknowledged this month that Israeli jets dropped bombs on a building that he said was "related to the military" but which he insisted was "not used."

Neither Iran nor any Arab government except Syria has criticized the Israeli raid, suggesting Israel is not the only country that would be disturbed by a nuclear Syria. North Korea issued a protest.

The White House press secretary Dana Perino said Saturday that the administration would have no comment on the intelligence issues surrounding the Israeli strike. Israel has also refused to comment.